Unpopular opinion: Champions that don't add anything unique to the game should be reworked/removed.

At the moment I am writing this, LoL has 145 champions. At which point does Riot intend to put a stop on it? 200? 250? 300?

Right now we have a batch of 10-40 champions that add nothing unique to the table. (depending on how rigorous your standards are and if you count lore+personality into the champion design) They are worse counterparts of existing champions or have a kit that would make Frankenstein's monster jealous of the amount of patchwork done to it.

Here are the problems with having so many champions:

1. (The most recent one.) Why play Hook support A, when Hook support B or C does the same thing while doing more damage/being tankier/harder to catch? If you don't give every champion unique identity and reason to be picked, you will keep running into this. People will just play whatever version of assassin/hook support/tank is the most OP at the moment. 2.** You alienate the player base of unpopular champions. **As a Shaco main, I can tell you I felt really really jealous and envious of all the assassins receiving updates and QoL changes while Shaco couldn't get simple bugfixes. With such a big amount of champions, some are bound to end up at the bottom of the barrel.
2. You force the meta to change/revolve around the select few champions. Yes, I said it. Feel free to downvote me into oblivion but the meta has been changing around the select core of champions for the last 3 years. It is not that you couldn't make meta revolve around some champion like Master Yi, but you simply can't do that at this point Riot. 3(b) Some champions just end up being Ban Shields for other champions. And keep in mind that when the 10 bans were introduced, LoL had added 10 new champions to the game, with one more coming out this year. If 135 champions correspond to 10 ban slots, then every 13.5 champions we should get 1 new ban slot. Or every 27 champions we should get 2 more ban slots. And we still run the risk of bans overlapping each other.
3. **Every single one of the 145 champions needs constant work. ** That is 145 champions that need to have skins, bug fixes, balance updates, lore updates, etc. And as LoL gets older and older, the amount of work only increases.

Now, don't get me wrong, not every champion needs to have some unique game-breaking mechanic. I think that it is perfectly fine to have an entry-level champion such as Annie for every role, even two if you want to make sure new players always have something to play. A word of caution: I am not even talking about if the concept should stay as a whole. Someone like Yasuo and Zoe are extremely unique but have a bad reputation for that "uniqueness". Some unique champions should definitely be reworked because they are toxic to play against **but that isn't the point of my post. **I just wanted to talk about the problems of the champions that always seem to end up forgotten by Riot and the community.

To finish, I want to remind everyone that we have yet to add some really popular archetypes to the champion pool, most notable of which are: Baby Yaga/ cackling crazy old lady, Hivemind champion, Weaponized Mirror champion and others.